Our Class Poem

Each generation has its blades — And we were the umbilical swordsmen:
We cleaved the clinging mothers from our rib
And ribbed our rinds with scandalous fruit,
We rode our mangers down the years
And swamped the deathbed ebbing of the old
With stallion-studded blood; We were the studs of Spring.

Our hair turned in the locks of Youth,
Our mustard-tongued mouths burned History's witch,
Our lips were windy with desecration.
We felt the sermoned fishes tugging at our tide
And summoned young-yeared wishes
Against the Cross-hooked lives
But the lines of our blood were taught
And could never be broke by boys.

So we pay no heed to our hauling veins,
We built our bones with beer and song
While the age-old rhythm of our blood
Rocked like a Hofbrau sea
In the holy houses of our grandfathers' drunken dreams.

Mute Heritage mouthed her plasmic strength around our spine,
Marrowed a stillness in our bone,
Moulded a laboring curve into our backs,
Shaped our thumbs with triumph,
Soothed Youth's negative nerve,
And loosed a trumpet in the loin
To sing the majesty of Man . . .

We pay no heed, like children with blocks
We wild and tempered blades must topple the crown of Time.

Now a new hand — holding kindergarten
Files in two by two;
From the womb-wasting weather of their veins
Hear the romper-room raging of our blood!
For the son is singing with his father's sins
And he cleaves from his mother with a song.